ANNOUNCEMENTS

The special issue of Filmicon “Strategies of the Documentary” seeks to address the diverse aesthetic, historical, medial, and theoretical connections between moving images and all possible aspects of the ‘documentary.’ In light of the many facets of this key term, the issue does not confine itself to practices or traditions of documentary cinema in Greece. It rather explores the multiple cinematic acts and modes of registering, representing, evidencing, authenticating, certifying, and instructing. It discusses the indexical nature of photography and the digital image, the factual as well as fictional functions of audio-visual recording, the archival status of documentary film in Greece, its ideologies, deceptions, and omissions, the filmic depiction of documentation processes, the documents presented on-screen or lost in the Mediterranean Sea. This thematic focus responds to three interrelated circumstances:

w Greek cinema exhibits a long tradition and wide variety of documentary practices which, up to now, have hardly been analyzed on a larger scale (see, however, Stefani 2007 and Stathi / Skopeteas 2009). Therefore, “Strategies of the Documentary” intends to delineate past as well as present documentary strategies, trace their historical dominants and archaeological margins, and bring Greek and international concepts and timelines of the documentary into closer contact.

w Recent years have seen a significant expansion of the ‘documentary’ mode: for instance, one can observe a growing ambiguity regarding the relation between world and image; the latter no longer claims unconditional vérité or directness but introduces distance, irony, and submits to the ontological uncertainties of docufictions and mockumentaries. Beyond that, the documentary may verge on animation and the virtual, while in other cases approaching the body or synaesthetic experience. “Strategies of the Documentary” offers a forum to explore such tendencies and techniques in Greek film culture.

w From Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to New Materialism, several recent theories question and reconfigure authoritative dualities such as active/passive, subject/object, concrete/abstract, or thing/image. In so doing, they challenge the relation between world and gaze on which many documentary concepts rely; they dismiss the idea of a ‘perception’ of reality and conceive of things as autonomously contributing to a larger sphere of awareness, action and politics. “Strategies of the Documentary” seeks to shine a light on new theories and strategies of the documentary that might react to, or reflect on, such ‘post-humanist’ approaches.

Please send completed articles (5000-8000 words) to all editors by 20^th October 2019. An initial editorial decision will be made, concerning the fit of the article to the issue’s aims and coverage and all authors will be informed of the outcome of this decision. The selected articles will subsequently be submitted for blind peer review which will inform the final selection of the articles. The special issue is scheduled to be published in the Autumn 2020.

Please follow Filmicon’s guidelines for authors: http://filmiconjournal.com/journal/submissions#guidelines

Please email your article (attached as a word document) to all editors by the 20^th October 2019:

Visiting Professor Ulrich Meurer (Central European University)
ulrich.meurer@univie.ac.at

Associate Professor Maria Oikonomou (University of Vienna / Thessaloniki)
maria.oikonomou@univie.ac.at

Teaching Fellow in Film & Television (University of Reading)
a.kazakopoulou@reading.ac.uk

In December 2016, in an international conference entitled “50 years of Greek Television” that took place in Thessaloniki, organized by the Laboratory of Cultural and Visual Studies of the Department of Journalism and Mass Media Communication, both well-established and emerging scholars came together to discuss the past, present, and future of (the academic study of) Greek television. The conference delivered a wide array of arguments in favor of a fresh and unapologetic – yet rigorous – approach to the study of the popular medium, as well as its content, production conditions, technological transformations, historical and socio-political parameters, and impact on Greek society. With this rejuvenated interest in the study of Greek television as an overarching guideline, this special issue of Filmicon: Journal of Greek Film Studies aspires to introduce the theme of Greek Television Studies, with a particular focus on the study of television fiction made and seen within the Greek context.

Ever since its emergence as part of the British cultural studies during the 1970s, television studies have charted a progressive yet certainly complicated course. From a neglected cousin, television studies have succeeded in becoming independent from film and media studies, to the point that they have now come to be considered an ‘established field’ with its own degrees and courses at different Anglophone universities. Furthermore, thanks to its disciplinary hybridity, the study of television in countries like the UK and the USA has attracted extensive scholarly attention from a variety of disciplines, particularly the humanities and social sciences, thus resulting in an exponentially rich body of monographs and articles that read and decode – among other formats – the polysemy of television shows and series.

The academic study of Greek television, however, has a limited place in the national and international bibliography. Previous studies have adopted mainly autobiographic, historical and sociological approaches in an attempt to capture ‘the big picture’ of Greek television and chronicle the evolution of the medium, as well its impact on viewers across different time periods and cultural moments. It can be argued that with the exception of television critics and relatively recent academic interventions in collective volumes and articles, such as Kaklamanidou (2017), Vamvakas & Paschalidis (2018), and Aitaki (2015, 2017, 2018), the discussion around Greek fiction still remains in its infancy. This lack of systematic engagement with the area of television fiction, combined with the closure of the MEGA channel, signifies a need to discuss and reconsider Greek television’s traditionally ‘unserious’ cultural archive, especially within the context of commercially oriented television.

This special issue wishes to create a space for reflections upon Greek television fiction produced so far since the deregulation of Greek television and the emergence of private channels in 1989. We thus ask that all contributions – whether historical approaches, case studies or comparative analyses – engage with the Greek televisual content and create new pathways to read, understand and explore the academic field of Greek television studies.

The scope of the special issue may include (but is not restricted to) the following themes revolving around Greek TV fiction:

• Textual and contextual analysis of case studies
• Genres and sub-genres
• Representation of gender, sexuality, body image, ethnicity and/or disability
• ‘Identity politics’ and intersectionality
• Production, reception and consumption
• Book-to-TV adaptations
• Television series and audiences
• Television fiction and fandom
• Television fiction in the Internet age
• Convergence culture
• Programming strategies and reruns
• The case of MEGA channel

Submission Guidelines

Authors should submit a 300-word abstract for their papers including a title, aim and brief background, sources of data & method, and potential arguments/results if already known by 20 January 2019. Proposals, along with authors’ contact information and a short bio of maximum 100 words should be submitted via e-mail to greektvstudies@gmail.com. The editors will make a decision and will contact authors by 1 February 2019.

The deadline for article submissions is 30 June 2019, while the special issue is expected to appear in December 2019. All submissions should be in the range of 5,000-8,000 words, written in English, and prepared for an anonymous peer review process. Please note that prospective articles should not have been previously published or should not currently be under consideration for publication elsewhere.

Any queries should be addressed to the editors of the special issue Georgia Aitaki and Spyridon Chairetis at: greektvstudies@gmail.com

A few words about the special issue editors:

Georgia Aitaki works as a research associate for the Department of Journalism, Media and Communication at the University of Gothenburg. Her doctoral dissertation entitled The private life of a nation in crisis: A study on the politics in/of Greek television fiction offers in-depth studies of the fictional reconstruction and negotiation of moments of heightened societal tension in Greek television fiction since 1989 (University of Gothenburg, 2018). Her research interests revolve around television fiction, television criticism, the production culture of commercial television, as well as the relationship between Greek media and society. Her work has been published in journals such asMedia, Culture & Society, Critical Studies in Television, and Social Semiotics.

Spyridon Chairetis is a DPhil/ PhD candidate in Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Oxford. His doctoral thesis examines queer potentialities and ambivalences in Greek TV comedy texts produced in the 1990s and 2000s. He holds a BA in English literature, University of Athens and has studied Contemporary European Politics (University of Bath, UK & Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) and Creative Writing (University of W. Macedonia, Greece) at Master’s level. He serves as gender/sexuality editor of E-International Relations and his work has been published in journals and blogs, includingFilmicon: Journal of Greek Film Studies, Social Anthropology, and Oxford Queer Studies Network.

Filmicon: Journal of Greek Film Studies is now accepting new blog posts. We welcome original pieces, interviews, articles, film reviews, book reviews, etc about Greek film, television and audiovisual culture. The blog posts range between 1500-3000 words and can be written either in English or Greek (or both language).

For our submission guidelines please click here.

Please send your blog post to Mikela Fotiou at mikela.fotiou@gmail.com or at filmiconjounal@gmail.com.

We still have space for 2-3 more articles for the upcoming issue of Filmicon: Journal of Greek Film Studies, scheduled to come out at the end of the year. The turnaround for the blind peer review process will be quick, so the deadline for submissions is also rather tight. We therefore mostly appeal to those of you who may have part-completed/completed work, or those who think they may be able to commit to a short deadline.

This is an open issue, so there is no restriction in terms of theme. The deadline for submissions is Monday 15th October. Submission guidelines can be found here: http://filmiconjournal.com/journal/submissions#guidelines.

Please contact Tonia Kazakopoulou (toniakazakopoulou@gmail.com) or Maria Chalkou (mchalkou@yahoo.co.uk) at filmiconjournal@gmail.com if you require further information or assistance. Please submit articles by email using filmiconjounal@gmail.com.

Dear all,

The third Contemporary Greek Film Cultures international conference: Strategies of the Documentary, took place between 16-19 May 2018, hosted by Maria Oikonomou and Lilia Diamantopoulou at the University of Vienna. Many thanks to the organisers for a successful and truly inspiring event, which has helped expand our understanding of what Greek Film Cultures – plural – could mean. And our thanks to all the contributors for really thought-provoking papers.

We now call for expressions of interest in hosting/organising the 4th Contemporary Greek Film Cultures conference in 2020/21 in your institution.

Contemporary Greek Film Cultures has established itself as a regular feature in the Greek Film Studies calendar internationally, thanks to your support. The aim is to bring together the international community of Greek film scholars to share and discuss new research in the field every 2-3 years, at a different location each time. In addition, every conference is followed by at least one publication of selected papers, expanding and enriching the bibliographical corpus of Greek Film Studies. Most of all, this is an initiative that seeks to enhance collaborations and networking between scholars with interest in Greek cinema, as well as to become a bridge between industry and academia (in all conferences so far directors and actors have participated with keynote addresses, Q&As, screenings of their work).

Please contact the curators of the conference Tonia Kazakopoulou and Mikela Fotiou using the following email address to submit your interest in hosting the next meeting of Greek film scholars. In your email, please propose a theme and indicate how you would seek to fund the organisation of the conference, whether your institution would agree/has already agreed to support such an enterprise, and a rough timeline for the event. We can provide logistic support, and any other help you may need.

Please write to: contemporarygreekfilm2013@gmail.com as soon as possible, and no later than the end of October 2018, using the subject line 'CGFC 2020'. Do not hesitate to contact us any time before that if you have further queries.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Tonia Kazakopoulou and Mikela Fotiou

Following on the second International Conference on Balkan Cinema that took place in Belgrade in 2017, The Great War(s): Our Story aims to explore how the Great War and other conflicts in the region have been narrated through cinema. The 3rd International Conference on Balkan cinema will focus on moving images made by filmmakers both from within and outside the Balkans in order to highlight the connections and differences between these war narratives that have at times coalesced into “our story”. The term “our” can refer self-reflexively to a view from the Balkans as both a unified but also more dispersed space, but also to a range of identities: victims or perpetrators, civilians or soldiers, women and children in devastated cities and in the wasteland of the countryside, or men on the front, the generations of participants or the post-generations. [...]

Following on from the first International Conference on Balkan Cinema that took place in Athens in 2015, Balkan Cinema on the Crossroads: From Nitrate to Digital aims to explore the trajectory of Balkan cinema from the early nitrate days to the contemporary digital era, by highlighting connections, similarities and comparable patterns across the cinemas of the region. With few exceptions, linguistic and political differences have usually led to nation-based approaches to the cinemas of the region. This series of conferences aims to develop transnational scholarship, transcend Balkanism and exoticism, and offer critical explorations of historical and contemporary manifestations of South Eastern European cinemas. The ambition is both to enlighten the past by proposing new ways of examining the region’s cinema history; and to build foundations for future cross-cultural collaborations and mutual prospects. [...]

In the last twenty years, genre in Greek Cinema has often been at the centre of scholarly research that produced a significant and acknowledged body of work on the subject. Research interest, however, has been limited predominantly to national versions of popular genres such as comedies, musicals, melodramas, or the mountain film (foustanella) and to the mainstream narrative films of the so-called Old Greek Cinema. This restricted focus has created two misconceptions: on the one hand that generic forms disappeared after the decline of the industry in the early 1970s, and on the other that genre is the exclusive domain of commercial cinema.

In this context elitism and commercial failure have been simplistically ascribed to the films and filmmakers of Greek Cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, while methodological approaches derived mainly from auteur theory and cultural criticism have been applied to their work. Thus, commercial successes such as Petrina hronia/ Stone Years (Pantelis Voulgaris, 1985), Loufa ke parallagi/ Loafing and Camouflage (Nikos Perakis, 1984) or Rembetico (Costas Ferris 1983) and their relationship to genre have been disregarded, while the generic features of Nikolaidis’s and Panayotopoulos’s films (just to mention two of the most significant filmmakers of New Greek Cinema), within particular local and international contexts, have attracted little attention.

Although in the 1990s and 2000s genre cinema gained growing importance as post-classical expression in both art and mainstream global cinema, and Greece saw a resurgence of commercial and art film, only a few studies have explored the various manifestations and transformations of genre in contemporary Greek film production. The flourishing of popular comedies drawing on the conventions of Old Greek Cinema and/or Greek TV series, the emergence of melodramas with a camp or queer sensibility, of crime films with sociopolitical nuances and even hybrid horror films with figures such as the vampire and zombie are only a few aspects of this unexplored field. It goes without saying that the relation of the so called ‘Greek Weird Wave’ to genre is also in need of a meticulous research.

Keeping in mind that the boundaries between ‘Old’, ‘New’ and ‘contemporary’ Greek cinema, as well as between popular/commercial/mainstream and art cinema are more fluid than these schematic terms tend to describe, this thematic special issue aspires to broaden, reassess and reposition the notion of genre in the context of Greek Film Studies, focusing mainly on film production from the 1970s to the present.

Areas of interest for this special issue include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Theorizing and historicizing genre in Greek Film Studies within local, transnational and international contexts.
• Contesting genres: hybridity, parody, transtextuality and other generic transformations.
• Tracing the development of melodrama, comedy and musicals from the 1970s and beyond.
• Unexplored genres and subgenres in the context of New and contemporary Greek cinema like the Greek sci-fi and fantasy film, the vampire and zombie movie, the crime film and others.
• Genre and the nation.
• Representations of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class and race.
• Genre and the representation of the past: the heritage film, the nostalgia film, the historical film, the period film and the costume drama.
• Genre and authorship: rethinking established auteurs of the New and contemporary Greek cinema under the genre category.
• TV genres (TV series, commercials) and their impact on screen, especially in the 1990s and 2000s.
• Industry and genres: issues of production, promotion, exhibition and consumption.
• Genres and film reception.

Authors should submit a 300-word abstract for their papers including the title, a short description of the topic(s) to be addressed and the approach that will be taken by 15^th May 2016. Proposals, along with authors’ contact information and a short bio of maximum 100 words should be submitted via e-mail to filmgenregr@gmail.com. The editors will make a decision and will contact authors on their proposals by the 12^th of June.

The deadline for article submissions is the 30^th of November 2016, while the special issue is expected to appear in October 2017. All submissions should be in the range of 5,000-8,000 words, written in English, and prepared for an anonymous peer review process. Please note that prospective articles should not have been previously published or should not currently be under consideration for any other publication.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact the editors of the special issue Afroditi Nikolaidou, Anna Poupou and Maria Chalkou at: filmgenregr@gmail.com.

This conference aims to broaden the geo-cultural scope of early film studies by providing a forum for scholarship on early and silent cinema in the Balkans and the Near East. These geopolitical designations are to be taken heuristically, as temporary placeholders for conceptual mappings that remain to be developed and that this conference seeks to encourage. [...]

The Contemporary Greek Film Cultures 2013 conference committee (Mikela Fotiou, Tonia Kazakopoulou and Philip Phillis) greatly supports the Filmicon initiative and is delighted to collaborate with its Editors on a Special Issue dedicated to the study of Greek Cinema. So, the second issue of Filmicon will be a special volume stemming from the conference Contemporary Greek Film Cultures 2013 taking place in London on the 5th and 6th July.

Both the conference and the Special Issue aim to promote a concerted study and theorisation of Contemporary Greek Cinema and the overall culture surrounding it. Moreover, in seeking to address gaps in current literature about the study of Greek film, this Special Issue will aim to provide a collection of articles that focus on contemporary concerns, debates and practices of Greek Cinema, which has witnessed a rebirth and recognition in the last couple of decades, both nationally and internationally.

All submissions should be extended / developed versions (between 5,000-8,000 words) of the papers presented at Contemporary Greek Film Cultures 2013 conference, written in English, prepared for an anonymous peer review process and sent to contemporarygreekfilm2013@gmail.com. Use of images and short videos is particularly encouraged, though relevant copyright permissions will need to be obtained by the authors. Please note that the prospective articles should not have been previously published or should not currently be under consideration for any other publication.

The deadline for article submissions is the 1st November 2013 (no submissions will be considered after this date), while the Special Issue is expected to appear in June 2014. For further information on the format of the articles, the peer review process, and how to submit a manuscript for consideration, please check here.

Please do not hesitate to ask questions and contact us at: contemporarygreekfilm2013@gmail.com